3: The Foreign Kings
<< 2: The National Kingdom || 4: The Period of Division >>
THE extinction of the old national dynasty with Andrew III's death altered its
conditions of existence for the Hungarian state. Under its own interpretation of the
position, the right of electing its new king had now reverted to the nation, whose freedom
of choice was in theory unlimited; there was no theoretical bar to its setting one of its
own members over it. But a firmly-implanted European usage had by this time come to limit
the enjoyment of royal dignity to those who could show some hereditary title to it, most
of these persons belonging to a small clique - into which the Árpáds themselves had
levered themselves - of interrelated families of, as it were, professional royalties. It
would have required a strong man, with a united nation behind him, to defy a
well-supported claim from a member of one of these families, and the Hungarians, too,
admitted the compulsive virtue of the blood-tie. They themselves confined their search to
persons in whose veins the blood of the Árpáds ran, at least through some maternal
forbear, who could continue the line - the line, not an individual, for the choice once
made, the principle of legitimacy came into operation again. It was the singular
misfortune of the country that for over two centuries after 1301, only one king died
leaving behind him legitimate male issue. This meant that except in the one case in
question, and in the two others where peculiar circumstances resulted, after all, in the
election of a national king, their chosen ruler always came from some foreign, and
foreign-based, dynasty. In fact, until the sixteenth century, when the Crown became
permanently vested in the Habsburg dynasty, it was worn (transitory and disputed cases
apart) by two Angevins, one Luxemburger, one Habsburg and three Jagiellos; with,
intervening, two national kings, one of whom ruled only in part of the country.
To have a foreign king was by no means always an unmixed disadvantage for Hungary.
Fresh ideas and institutions were sometimes brought in which fructified and enriched the
political, social, cultural and economic life of the country, and without which it might
well have failed to keep pace with the general advance of the contemporary Europe towards
a higher level of civilisation. It is true that the Hungarians did not always relish these
innovations, and often bound the monarch of their choice by strict capitulations to
respect their own hardly-won and cherished national institutions. Their ability to do this
- an outcome, strictly speaking, of the electoral nature of the Crown, not of the fact
that the candidate was usually a foreigner - was a main reason why, for good or ill (and
the advantages did not lie all on one side), Hungary throughout her history was able to
preserve her native features in a larger degree than most other European countries. But
the central issue was nearly always that of power, in relation to the international
situation. A monarch disposing of resources of his own could be hoped to use them for the
country's benefit, and especially for its defence; it was this calculation which more than
once determined the national choice. On the other hand, a too powerful monarch, the centre
of whose power and interests alike lay outside Hungary, might too easily use those
resources, not to develop the country's national life, but to crush it, and to squander
its own resources in the pursuit of his private, extra-Hungarian, objectives. The balance
of advantage and disadvantage, in this respect, swayed uneasily throughout the centuries
with the fluctuations of the international power-position and the personality of the
ruler. Under many of its foreign rulers, and almost continuously after the Crown became
stabilised in the house of Habsburg, the central problem of the country's whole political
life was whether the benefits brought by foreign rule outweighed its disadvantages; and on
this question opinion in the country was eternally divided, up to the last day of Habsburg
rule.
These considerations were not yet apparent in the first years after Andrew's death.
What happened then was simply that the dynastic rivalry of ten years before broke out
again in modernised form, the Angevin candidate, whom the Pope supported, being now
Charles Martell's son, the boy, Charles Robert; the Czech, another boy, Wenceslas III, for
whom his father stood sponsor. This time Albrecht of Habsburg did not claim the throne for
himself, contenting himself with supporting Charles Robert. Charles Robert, Wenceslas and
Otto of Bavaria all had their partisans inside Hungary, and at first Charles Robert's
party was the weakest of all. Both Wenceslas and Otto were in turn crowned, and Charles
Robert's supporters could only give him a symbolic coronation, with a substitute crown(1). But in a few years his rivals gave up the struggle in
disgust. On 20 August 1310 he was crowned again, this time in due form, and thereafter his
rule was not seriously opposed from abroad. He still, indeed, had many opponents among the
'kinglets', but he was able to win most of them over by diplomacy, and in 1312 won a
crushing victory at Rozgony over the chief of the remaining malcontents, the Amadés and
the Csáks. This victory re-established the royal authority on a firm footing; the only
internal trouble which he had to face thereafter was in reality only half internal,
fomented by Venice.
Charles Robert was undoubtedly favoured by the international situation, which, with
Germany distraught by the conflict between Empire and Papacy, the Tatars grown passive in
the east and the power of Byzantium in full decay, was more favourable than ever before or
since to the independent development of the states of east-central Europe. It is no
accident that Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Serbia should all look back on the fourteenth
century as the age of their greatest glory. As these conditions favoured Hungary's
neighbours, as well as herself, Charles Robert's attempts at expansion were only
moderately successful. He made Bosnia his friend and client, but Venice snatched South
Dalmatia from him, Serbia, the Bánát of Macsó, and the newly-founded 'Voivody' of
Wallachia disputed Szörény with him and in 1330 inflicted a heavy defeat on his arms.
Against this, he drove the Austrian and Czech marauders out of his land, and, on the
whole, preserved friendly relations with Poland, Bohemia and Austria.
The latter part of his reign was in the main peaceful and marked by a steadily
increasing prosperity, the lion's share of which accrued to the king himself.
One of the chief props of his power was the wealth which he derived from the gold mines
of Transylvania and north Hungary, the production of which he stimulated by a number of
sensible devices. Eventually it reached the remarkable figure of 3,000 lb. of gold
annually - one third of the total production of the world as then known, and five times as
much as that of any other European state. Some 30-40 per cent of this accrued to the Crown
as revenue and enabled Charles Robert, first of all Hungarian kings, to introduce a
systematic fiscal policy. He renounced the lucrum camerae, or profit on the
coinage, on which many of his predecessors had largely depended, introduced a stable
currency based on gold, and reformed the system of direct taxation, basing it on a
house-tax levied on every porta or peasant household.(2)
He still had enough to maintain a sumptuous and refined court, the cultural influences at
which were, incidentally, French rather than German.
Not the least of the benefits conferred by Charles Robert on Hungary was to leave
behind him, in the person of his son Louis (Lajos) an heir whose succession (jure
legitimo) was not questioned either inside or outside Hungary. Conventional
historians reckon the reign of Louis (the only one of its kings on whom the nation has
conferred the name of 'Great') as marking the apogee of Hungarian history. Louis was, of
course, fortunate in that the favourable European constellation continued to prevail, and,
at home, he could build on the foundations laid firmly by his father; but in addition, he
was a man of remarkable qualities of both head and heart. Charles Robert had been more
respected than loved, especially after one curious incident in which he took an
extraordinarily barbarous revenge on the family of a man who had tried to assassinate him;
Louis was generally loved. 'I call God to witness', the Venetian envoy wrote of him, 'that
I never saw a monarch more majestic or more powerful, nor one who desires peace and calm
so much as he.' 'There was no other', wrote another contemporary, 'so kind and noble, so
virtuous and magnanimous, so friendly and straightforward.' He was indeed a true paladin,
distinguished not least for his extraordinary physical courage in battle.
It was chiefly his international triumphs that earned him the name of 'Great'. Keeping
the peace with his western neighbours, he resumed Béla III's policy of expansion in the
south and east. Venice was forced to re-cede Dalmatia. The Bánáts in the northern
Balkans were restored. The Ban of Bosnia and the Voivodes of Wallachia and Moldavia (where
a second Vlach principality had come into being when the Tatars were driven out of it)
acknowledged him as their suzerain, as did, for shorter periods and more formally, the
rulers of Serbia, northern Bulgaria and, for a few years, Venice itself. Galicia and
Lodomeria were recovered in 1354. Over this ring of dependencies, Hungary presided as Archiregnum.
The climax of Louis' glory came in 1370, when, by virtue of a dynastic compact
concluded in 1354 with Casimir of Poland, he ascended the Polish throne.
At home, the gold flowed in an undiminished stream into Louis' coffers, enabling him to
keep a court even more splendid than his father's. And the whole country, spared for two
generations from serious invasion or civil war, blossomed with a material prosperity which
it had never before known. By the end of Louis' reign its total population had risen to
some three millions, and it contained 49 royal boroughs, over 500 market towns and more
than 26,000 villages. The economy was still predominantly agricultural, but as these
figures show, the towns, which the Angevins favoured especially, granting many of them
extensive charters of self-government, prospered. Craftsmen began to practise their trades
and to organise themselves in guilds. International commerce, favoured by the continued
stability and high repute of the currency, began to make headway.
The arts, too, flourished. A university, one of the earliest in Europe, was founded in
Pécs in 1367 (it is true that it proved short-lived). The first comprehensive national
chronicle, one copy of which is one of the most magnificent illuminated codices in Europe,
dates from about the same period.
This prosperity, and not less the order which the two Angevins were able to enforce,
allowed the nation to accept, without serious resentment, the fact that their reigns
constituted what to modern eyes would appear a period of political reaction. Even the
memory of Andrew III's constitutional innovations (which had, indeed, never been put into
practice) vanished, it seems, even from memory, under their rules. They made appointments
according to their pleasure, legislated as they pleased, and when (occasionally) they
convoked a Diet, it was simply to inform it of decisions taken. Their absolutism was,
however, not the old patrimonial absolutism of St Stephen and his successors, which was
foreign to their eyes, but a much more hierarchical structure which embodied many features
of west European feudalism. Even after Charles Robert had broken the power of the
kinglets, he did not attempt to destroy the magnates as a class, but bestowed a large part
of the confiscated estates on a new set of great families. Louis continued this policy,
and by the end of his reign about fifty of these families owned between them one-third of
the soil of Hungary. The status and importance of the magnates was enhanced by the new
military system introduced by the Angevins. Military service was still the obligation of
all noblemen, who, when their services were required, were mustered under the 'banners' of
the king, the queen, or one of the great officials (the Voivode of Transylvania, etc.),
smaller contingents following the Ispáns of their counties. But the lords were now
required to bring contingents of heavily-armed cavalry from among their own followers; if
a force numbered fifty men, it served under its lord's banner, and was known as his banderium.
Many small nobles took service in these private banderia. It was at this
time, and largely through this innovation, that the class of familiares - small
nobles who took service, military or other, under a magnate, becoming his henchmen and
retainers, while he in practice, although not in theory, was their feudal superior, became
numerous.
This growth of the magnates' power was, indeed, partially compensated by another
development, in the opposite direction. It was not everywhere that a magnate's authority
quite eclipsed that of the county in which he had his estates, and under the Angevins'
system of delegating power, rather than exercising it directly through their own officials
(they were no bureaucrats) the control of the administration and justice in each county
passed during their reigns increasingly into the hands of the universitates of
the local nobles, who exercised it through their own elected representatives. These 'noble
counties', which now began to replace the old 'royal counties', first the special preserve
and stronghold of the richer common nobles. They were, of course, still subject to the
ultimate control of the king's representative, the Ispán, and the most common effect of
the development, at least during its early stages, was to strengthen the king's authority
by providing him, in the lesser nobles, with a counter-weight against the magnates, such
as the rulers of economically more developed countries found in the burgesses of their
towns. This consideration led several of the kings to allow the counties to develop a very
extensive autonomy, which at a later stage, when the magnate class had allied itself with
the Crown, became the defence of the smaller men and, the crown being worn by foreign
rulers, the defence also of the national cause, which they came to represent against both
the other forces.
In 1351 Louis also confirmed the Golden Bull, adding an explicit declaration that all
nobles enjoyed 'one and the same liberty', a provision which, it appears, besides
reaffirming the rights of the noble class as a whole, including the familiares, also
enlarged its ranks by bringing full noble privileges to a further class of border-line
cases. Other provisions of the law stabilised land tenure by universalising the system of aviticitas
under which all land was entailed in the male line of the owner's family, collaterals
succeeding in default of direct heirs; if the line died out completely, the estate
reverted to the Crown. The daughters of a deceased noble were entitled to a quarter of the
assessed value of his property, but this had to be paid them in cash.
At the same time, Louis standardised the obligations of the peasant to his lord at
one-ninth of his produce -neither more nor less. As he also had to pay the tithe to the
church and the porta to the state, the peasant's obligations were thus not
inconsiderable, but do not appear to have been crushing in this age of prosperity; his
right of free migration was specifically re-affirmed.
Some Hungarian historians do not count the two Angevin as foreign kings at all, and it
is true that both of them, especially Louis, who was born and bred in Hungary, regarded
themselves completely as Hungarians. Charles Robert had no other throne, and did not try
to acquire another for himself. Louis treated all his acquisitions, except perhaps that of
Poland, as appendices to Hungary, and even Poland he ruled through Hungarians. But it is
easily arguable that his Balkan enterprises brought Hungary, on balance, more loss than
profit, even if the large expense of them be left out of account, for few of the vassals
proved loyal when a crisis came. Rather they regarded Hungary as an oppressor and hastened
to make common cause with her enemies.(3) She certainly got
nothing at all, except a little reflected glory, out of Louis' acquisition of Poland. In
south Italy Louis and his mother, carrying out plans laid by Charles Robert, embarked on
purely dynastic enterprises which brought positive and real damage to Hungary. The object
was to secure the throne of Naples for Charles' younger son, Andrew, who, under a compact
between Charles and Robert of Sicily, had married Robert's granddaughter, Joanna, on the
understanding that he should succeed to the throne on Robert's death (her father, Charles,
having predeceased Robert). But Andrew's accession was unpopular in Naples. To get him
recognised at all cost enormous sums of money in bribes, and, after a short and insecure
reign, he was murdered. Louis undertook two campaigns in Italy to avenge his brother and
secure the throne for the latter's little son. Both were unsuccessful, and cost Hungary
money which, spent in the country, would have transformed the face of it.
Matters took a sharp turn for the worse when Louis died in 1382. He had left no son,
but two daughters, of whom he had destined the elder, Maria, then a girl of eleven, and
betrothed to Sigismund, younger son of the Emperor Charles IV and himself Marquis of
Brandenburg, to succeed him on both his thrones. The Poles refused to continue the union
with Hungary, and although they ended by accepting Maria's younger sister, Hedwig or
Jadwiga, as queen, they married her to Jagiello of Lithuania, under whom Poland's ways
diverged from Hungary's. The Hungarians themselves were divided on the question of the
female succession, and a party of them crowned the girls' cousin, Charles of Durazzo, only
to see him assassinated a month later. Another party had already crowned Maria, but her
rule was only nominal: Sigismund, after marrying his bride, got himself crowned as her
consort in 1387 and, after her death in 1395, ruled alone until his own
death in 1437.
Sigismund was at first extremely unpopular, not only for the cruelty with
which, in breach of his pledged word, he put Charles' leading supporters to the sword, but
also as an intruder and a foreigner. 'By God', one of his victims flung in his teeth, 'I
am no servant of thine, thou Czech swine.' In 1401 a group of nobles actually held him in
prison for several weeks, and two years later malcontents called in another anti-king,
who, however, failed to establish himself, although he retained possession of Dalmatia,
which he then sold to Venice. Later, passions cooled somewhat, but when Sigismund was
elected German king in 1410, and still more when he succeeded his brother in Bohemia in
1420, the nation complained with acerbity that he neglected its affairs.
His reign had its redeeming features. The momentum imported by the Angevins was still
carrying the country forward, economically and culturally, and Sigismund himself, although
extravagant and - at least in his youth -silly, was an intelligent enough man, with a
European outlook. He introduced a number of useful administrative and military reforms,
the latter including the institution of a militia portalis, or second-line army
of peasant soldiers, and not the Angevins themselves did more than he to promote the
prosperity of the towns and to raise their status. He encouraged manufacture, and was the
true father of Hungary's international trade, which he advanced by abolishing internal
duties, regulating tariffs on foreign goods and standardising weights and measures
throughout the country. Records show that Hungary in his day was importing cloth, linen,
velvet, silks and spices and southern delicacies; her chief exports were linen goods,
cloth, metal and iron goods, livestock, skins and honey. The memory of this well-being
survives in the many fine buildings, dating from his reign, still to be seen in Hungary's
towns. An unintentional benefit conferred by him on his country was that his repeated and
prolonged absences from Hungary, and his extravagances, both enabled and compelled his
subjects to recover some of the constitutional ground which they had lost to his
predecessors. He found himself obliged to consult Diets, if not regularly, at least
frequently, and to defer to the principle, then generally recognised in central Europe,
that their consent was necessary when a subsidy, or new taxation, was required. It was
during his reign that the office of the Palatine, who was head of the administration
during the king's absence, developed (this was, indeed, formally legalised only under his
successor) from that of the king's representative to that of intermediary between the king
and the nation, whose function and duty it was to 'represent law and justice for the
inhabitants of the country vis-à-vis the king's majesty, and for the king's
majesty vis-à-vis them'.
Under the same influences there now began to emerge the famous and peculiar mystic
doctrine, formulated in classical form in the sixteenth century by the jurist Werbôczy,
of the Holy Crown: to wit, that the true political being of Hungary resided in the
mystical entity (of which the physical crown was the incorporate symbol) of the Holy
Crown, of which the king was the head and the nation, or corporate aggregate of nobles,
the body; each member being incomplete without the other, and complementary to it, in that
the king was the fount of nobility and the nobles, in virtue of their right to elect their
king, the fount of kingship.
But the debit side of Sigismund's all too long reign was also very heavy. He never
succeeded in recovering Dalmatia, and in his efforts to do so, he pledged the valuable
counties of Szepes, a main source of the king's wealth, to Poland. The nation was
perfectly justified in its complaints over his long absences, and by reason of them, and
for other causes, partly personal, he was never truly master in the country. The new big
families whom the Angevins had promoted had on the whole remained loyal to their
benefactors, but they had yet acquired an unhealthy predominance in the country, and an
excess of power in their own preserves, and towards Sigismund, as we have seen, they
showed no such loyalty. He did not willingly promote their power, but in fact he increased
it by the lavish sale, to meet his extravagant expenditure, of crown lands, which by the
end of his reign were reduced to 5 per cent of the area of Hungary. Unable to cope with
his most powerful subjects as a class, he could do no more than play off some of them
against the rest. This he did by organising a group of them in a chivalric league, known
as 'the Order of the Dragon', of which he was himself President. Offices and favours were
shared out among the members of this group, but even they were not always reliable; cases
occurred when the Order itself defied the king.
The smaller men suffered, especially the peasants, whose condition deteriorated
substantially, less owing to any aggravation of their legal burdens (peasants serving in
the militia portalis were exempt from the porta tax) than from increases
in the tax itself, illegal exactions, and perhaps most of all, under the increasingly
rapid transition to a money economy, with which they could not easily cope. The consequent
unrest was fanned by the spread from Bohemia of Hussite doctrines, which took hold
especially in north Hungary, and was embittered by the cruelty with which the heretics
were persecuted. The first serious specifically peasant revolt which Hungary had ever
known broke out in the very last months of Sigismund's reign, as the result of the action
of a bishop in Transylvania in claiming the tithe in money. It spread over much of
Transylvania, and gained considerable temporary successes before it was put down. A
consequence of this revolt was the birth of an institution destined later to become
important, the 'Union of the Three Nations', under which the Hungarian nobles of the
Transylvanian counties, the Saxons and the Szekels formed a league for the mutual defence
of their interests against all parties, save only the king.
This grievous event occurred at a moment when Hungary was most sorely in need of all
her strength and all her unity, for her old unthreatened state was over. In 1352 the
Osmanli Turks had crossed the Straits and established themselves in Gallipoli. In 1362
they took Adrianople. In 1388 they made Sisman's Bulgaria tributary; in 1389 they
annihilated the power of Serbia on the field of Kossovo.
Sigismund, to do him justice, had early recognised the reality of the Turkish danger
(to which Louis had been curiously blind) and in 1395 had led an expedition into the
Balkans which had met with some success. He had followed this up the next year with a
larger expedition in which crusading contingents from many European countries had taken
part; but this time the Christian armies had been disastrously defeated at Nicopolis in
north Bulgaria (22 September 1396), the Hungarian contingent, which had formed the bulk of
the army, being annihilated, and Sigismund himself barely escaping with his life. Hungary,
and all central Europe, lay open to the invaders, and were only respited, not by their own
efforts, but by the intervention of Timur's Mongols, who were now threatening the Turks'
rear and in 1402 actually took the Sultan Bayazid himself prisoner, after a pitched battle
outside Ankara. For some time after this the Turks' operations on their European front
were on a reduced scale, but they recommenced in 1415. The Voivode of Wallachia submitted,
Bosnia repudiated Hungary's suzerainty, and her only remaining Balkan client was a
fragmentary Serbia under the 'Despot', George Brankovic. South Hungary itself and
Transylvania suffered repeated raids.
In 1437 the Sultan Murad was preparing for a grand attack on Hungary itself, and at
this most inauspicious juncture Sigismund died, having crowned his disservices to Hungary
by leaving no son, but only a girl, Elizabeth, the issue of his second marriage, with the
daughter of the Count of Cilli, who was married to Albrecht, head of the Albertinian line
of the Habsburgs and ruler of Austria Above and Below the Enns. Sigismund had designated
Albrecht to succeed him in both Hungary and Bohemia, and the Hungarians duly elected him,
while stipulating that he should. defend the country with all his forces (also, that he
should not accept the Imperial crown). All might have turned out well, for Albrecht, who
was both conscientious and able, was prepared to fulfil his promise and in fact set about
organising an army for a campaign against the Turks; but dysentery carried him off before
he had reigned two full years and another dynastic crisis broke out. Elizabeth was big
with child, and claimed at least the regency, but a majority of the Hungarians were
unwilling to wait for the birth of a child who might not even be a boy, and in any case to
endure a long regency under a woman. They elected the young king of Poland as Wladislav V.
Immediately after, Elizabeth was delivered of a boy, whom she succeeded in getting
crowned, calling in to support her the Czech war-lord, Giskra, who occupied north-western
Hungary. The position of the young Ulászló (as the Hungarians called him) was thus
threatened from the rear at the moment when he most needed security.
In this most critical hour Hungary was saved principally by the genius of a single man,
János (John) Hunyadi, one of the most interesting and attractive figures in the national
history. He had risen from small beginnings; son of a lesser noble of Vlach origin (it is
true that his ascent to position and wealth had been so meteoric as to give rise to
rumours that he was Sigismund's own natural son), he had begun life as a professional
condottiere, but had shown such extraordinary talent in that capacity that Sigismund had
given him high command, and Albrecht even higher, appointing him Ban of Szörény.
Ulászló, whose cause he had supported, promoted him to Captain-General of Belgrade and
Voivode of Transylvania. He was now the most important man in Hungary, after the young
king himself, and also in a fair way to becoming the richest, for he was as great a
money-maker as he was soldier; by not long after this, his private estates were estimated
to have covered nearly six million acres. In Transylvania, in 1442, Hunyadi brilliantly
defeated a Turkish army, then in 1443 persuaded UlászIó to undertake a campaign in the
Balkans, this being the first time for many years that the Turks had the offensive taken
against them on that front. This was so signally successful that the Sultan agreed to a
peace which liberated all Serbia from his rule. Unhappily, the Papal Legate, who had been
organising a crusade which was frustrated by Hunyadi's action in concluding the peace,
persuaded Ulászló that a word given to an infidel need not be kept. The next year he and
Hunyadi accordingly led a new army into the Balkans, where the enraged Sultan, meeting
them outside Varna on 10 November, defeated them disastrously. The young king himself
perished, with the flower of his army, while Hunyadi barely escaped with his life.
He managed, however, to get back to Hungary, where he performed a service hardly less
valuable than his feats in the field, in mediating a solution of the dynastic question.
For Elizabeth had meanwhile died, leaving her little boy, Ladislas (known as Ladislas
Posthumous), with the Holy Crown, in the charge of his uncle, the Emperor Frederick, and
the easy-going Frederick was content to leave Hunyadi in charge of Hungary as 'governor'
or 'regent' until the child should have grown up.
During the next years Hunyadi was by no means always successful; Giskra defeated him in
1447 and had to be left master of north-western Hungary, and in the same year he suffered
another heavy defeat at the hands of the Turks in Serbia. He did, however, succeed in
holding them back as no European had done before him. His crowning achievement came in
1456, when he so heavily routed a Turkish army which was besieging Belgrade that it was
seventy years before the danger recurred in so acute a form.
The relief of Belgrade, for which the Pope ordered all the church-bells of catholic
Europe to ring daily at noon(4), that the faithful might
pray in unison for it, was also Hunyadi's last victory, for he died a few weeks later of a
fever contracted in the camp. And at first it seemed as though he was to be ill repaid. In
1452 the Austrian and Bohemian Estates had forced Frederick to release Wladislas from
tutelage, and the next year he was solemnly reinstated as King of Hungary. The boy-king
allowed Hunyadi to remain de facto regent, but himself fell under the influence
of his maternal uncle, the Count of Cilli, who distrusted the Hunyadi family, a feeling
reciprocated by Hunyadi's brother-in-law, Mahal (Michael) Szilágyi. On Hunyadi's death,
Wladislas nominated his uncle as the new Captain-General of Hungary, passing over
Hunyadi's elder son, another Wladislas. Soon after, the king and his uncle visited
Belgrade, then in Szilágyi's hands, and Szilágyi's partisans murdered Cilli. The king
then treacherously seized Wladislas Hunyadi and put him to death; his younger brother
Mátyás (Matthew) Hunyadi, then a boy of sixteen, he took to Prague, where he threw him
into prison; only to die himself, still unmarried, a year later.
For the first time in Hungarian history there was now no candidate for the throne able
to put forward a claim based even tenuously on heredity. There were, of course,
pretendents enough, including the evergreen Emperor' Frederick, but this time the nation
was tired of foreign kings. The name of Hunyadi was magical among the small nobles, and it
was easy for Szilágyi to organise them to favour of the surviving bearer of the name. On
24 January 1458, while the great men were still debating, a huge multitude of common
nobles, assembled on the ice of the frozen Danube, proclaimed Mátyás king. Emissaries
having with some difficulty extracted him from the keeping of George Podiebrad, in Prague
(for the Czechs, too, had decided in favour of a national king), he was brought to Buda
and enthroned amid scenes of national rejoicing.
Mátyás Corvinus, as he is commonly known from his crest, a raven, is, with the
somewhat qualified exception of John Zápolyai, the only completely 'national' king to
have worn the Holy Crown after the extinction of the old dynasty, and it is natural that
Hungarian historians should have seen his reign, in retrospect, through something of a
golden haze. The remarkable glamour of his personality is undeniable. He was, as his
panegyrists never tire of repeating, a true Renaissance prince. He was exceedingly
talented in every respect: a brilliant natural soldier, a first-class administrator, an
outstanding linguist, speaking with equal fluency half a dozen languages, a learned
astrologer, an enlightened. patron of the arts and himself a refined connoisseur of their
delights. His library of 'Corvina' was famous throughout Europe. Besides the illuminated
manuscripts of which this mainly consisted (many of which he had specially wrought for him
by Italian craftsmen), his collections, on which he spent vast sums, included pictures,
statues, jewels, goldsmiths' work and other objets d'art. Under his patronage,
architecture and the arts flourished in Hungary. Scholars of European repute lived and
worked at his court and in the circle of the Archbishop-primate, János Vitéz. Some of
them produced elaborate and scholarly works, still valuable in parts, on Hungarian
history. The first book printed in Buda antedated Caxton. Sumptuous buildings sprang up in
the capital and in other centres. Most of these were destroyed in the subsequent Turkish
invasion, which also dispersed the remnants of his collections, but those which have
survived, notably the magnificent Coronation church of Buda, show that Mátyás' Hungary
could challenge comparison with most European states of the day. His reign saw the
foundation of Hungary's second university - unfortunately, another short-lived creation.
The word 'Renaissance' is to be taken exactly, for especially after Mátyás had
married, as his second wife, Beatrix of Aragon, daughter of the King of Naples, the
influences of the early Italian Renaissance dominated his court. They brought with them
the absurdities of the day. The cult of Attila and his Huns, at that time held to be the
Magyars' ancestors, flourished. The historian Bonfinius traced the Hunyadi's own ancestry
back to a Roman consul, himself the descendant of Zeus and the nymph Taygeta. But the
classical trappings were used to enhance the national glory. When Mátyás' father-in-law
sent him a Spanish horse-master he replied: 'For centuries we have been famed for our
skill in horsemanship, so that the Magyar has no need to have his horses dance with
crossed legs, Spanish fashion.'
Seen unromantically, his reign, of course, appears as the usual mixture of good and
bad. His first years were necessarily spent in consolidating his position, for he had many
opponents, both abroad and at home. Even Podiebrad had demanded a heavy ransom for
releasing him, and although the Emperor Frederick did not press his claim by arms, he,
too, demanded a big price for suspending them, and for restoring the Holy Crown. The
Czechs were still installed in north-western Hungary, the Turks still dangerous in the
Balkans. Many of the magnates were very hostile to the young upstart, as they regarded
him, and he soon became involved in a dispute with his own uncle and sponsor, Szilágyi,
who had hoped to rule for him till he grew older.
Mátyás overcame all these difficulties with energy and skill. Podiebrad was paid off,
Frederick bought off, through the mediation of the Pope; the Czechs were mopped up, an
accommodation having been reached with Giskra. Szilágyi was sent on an expedition into
the Balkans, which ended in his death, and the other magnates brought to heel. Two
successful expeditions were carried out against the Turks, a chain of fortresses built
along the southern frontier, and Hungarian suzerainty re-established, if in somewhat
shadowy form - it was worth little unless enforced by garrisons, which could not be spared
- over Bosnia, Serbia and Wallachia, and later, also over Moldavia.
It is by his acts after he had really become master of his country that Mátyás is to
be judged. His electors had bound him stringently to observe constitutional forms, and
this he always did, hearing the views of the Council and admitting the principle that the
Diet should meet annually. He actually enlarged the autonomous powers of the counties.
Nevertheless, the whole bent of his mind was towards the fashionable 'princely' absolutism
of his age, and his respect for constitutional institutions was largely formal. In
practice, he disregarded the Council; his real instruments were his secretaries, a body of
men picked by himself, generally young and often of quite obscure of origin. When the Diet
proved recalcitrant, he bent it to his will, ruthlessly enough. His rule was in fact a
near-absolutism, and the touchstone of it is, whether or no it was enlightened and
beneficial.
In some respects, it was certainly both these things. He simplified the administration
and made it more efficient, and carried through a grandiose reform of the entire judicial
system, abolishing many anachronisms and abuses and introducing a simplified and
accelerated procedure which was of particular benefit to the small man. He encouraged the
towns, especially the smaller market towns, and while not alleviating the legal position
of the serfs, in fact greatly improved their condition by the even-handed justice which he
enforced, so that when he was dead they mourned: 'King Mátyás is dead, justice is
departed.'
The central controversy of his day turned round his defence policy and the financial
burdens which he imposed on the nation in support of it. He trebled the size of the
militia portalis, following this up by the most famous of all his 'innovations', the
creation of a standing army, some 30,000 strong, which ranked as part of the king's banderium.
This force, which was drawn largely from the defeated Hussites, and was known, after its
commander, 'Black' John Haugwitz, as the 'Black Army', was his most powerful weapon
against all enemies, abroad or at home.
Since the upkeep of this force, supervening on the cost of his sumptuous court and his
collections, involved an expenditure far beyond what could be met out of ordinary revenue,
Mátyás reorganised the tax system in ways which cut at the root of the national
tradition. He screwed up the profits from the regalia, introduced a tributum fisci
regalis from which none of his subjects was exempt, and frequently in the latter half
of his reign, regularly - imposed a special porta tax of a florin per porta.
Although he conceded the right of the Diet to vote this, yet in 1470, when that body
objected, he dissolved it and had the tax collected by his servants. By these means he
raised the royal revenue to the unprecedented figure of 6-800,000 forints; although in
some years his expenditure far exceeded even this sum.
In the first years, the nation was prepared to accept extraordinary financial burdens
to redeem the Holy Crown, rid north Hungary of the Czechs, and above all, to secure its
defences against the Turks. But after his good beginning in the last-named field, Mátyás
allowed his attention to be distracted to the west. He had then some excuse: the Austrians
and Czechs were proving worse neighbours than the Turks, who remained passive for some ten
years after their defeats. But Mátyás let himself be drawn into an ever-widening circle
of campaigns in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and Austria, in pursuit for himself of the
Bohemian Crown, the dignity of Roman King and the succession to the Imperial Crown itself,
after Frederick should die. In fact, he succeeded in 1469 in making himself master of
Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia, with the title of King of Bohemia (although this was also
borne simultaneously by Podiebrad) and, in 1478, in forcing Frederick to cede him Lower
Austria and Styria. To his subjects, he justified these campaigns, and the taxes which he
levied to finance them, by the argument that Hungary alone was no match for the Turks;
that the sovereign princes of Austria and Bohemia would not help him and could not be
trusted not to stab him in the back; and that he could therefore only organise the great
crusade if he had at his disposal the resources of the Bohemian and Imperial Crowns. There
was perhaps something in this argument, for the only source which sent Mátyás any help
against the Turks was the Holy See, which sent some rather jejune subsidies. But the
Hungarians, although probably not oppressed by conscience-pricks over the blatant
aggressiveness of Mátyás' wars, saw no profit in them, had no ambition to become the
nucleus of a multi-national empire, and believed that Mátyás was simply gratifying
personal ambition at the expense of the security of Hungary's southern frontier - which,
in fact, the Turks raided again in 1474 and 1476, doing much damage. There was much
grumbling, and in 1470 a party which included some of Mátyás' oldest supporters
conspired to set Casimir of Poland on the throne, and next year Casimir actually crossed
the Carpathians at the head of an army.
He found few supporters and the enterprise collapsed easily enough; but it cannot be
said that in his lifetime Mátyás was ever beloved as Stephen I or Louis the Great had
been.
Mátyás might nevertheless have established a new, native dynasty; but neither of his
two wives bore him an heir. His only issue, a boy called John, was his illegitimate son by
a bourgeoise of Breslau. One of Mátyás' main preoccupations as he grew older was to
ensure this boy's succession, and he eventually reached agreement in principle with
Maximilian of Austria whereby John was to marry Maximilian's daughter; Hungary was to hand
back Austria and Styria to Maximilian; and Maximilian was to renounce his father's old
claims on Hungary and recognise John as its sovereign. But on 6 May 1490, when actually on
his way to the meeting which should have made the agreement definitive, Mátyás died
suddenly, and the whole house of cards collapsed. The smaller nobles would have liked
another ruler of the Hunyadi stock, but John's illegitimacy was a real objection, and he
himself was of too peaceable and unambitious nature to press his claim hard. Maximilian
was another candidate, but the magnates were afraid of him; what they wanted was, as one
of them put it cynically, 'a king whose plaits they could hold in their fists'. Such a man
was to hand in Wladislas Jagiello (Ulászló II in Hungarian history), whom the Bohemians
had chosen as their king in 1471 precisely for his negative qualities, a choice which he
had thereafter justified so amply as to earn from his subjects the name of 'King Dobre'
(King O.K.) from his habit of assenting without cavil to any proposal laid before him.
In the event Maximilian contented himself with the restoration of the Austrian
provinces and with an agreement that if Ulászló died without heirs, Maximilian himself,
or his heirs, should succeed. Thereafter he exercised an increasingly close, although
friendly, protectorate over Hungary, which was not altered when Ulászló, after many
curious adventures, eventually married and, in 1506, became father of a boy. Another
agreement was concluded in 1515 under which this boy, Louis, married Maximilian's
granddaughter, Mary, while his sister, Anne, was betrothed to Maximilian's younger
grandson, Ferdinand, who was to succeed to Louis's thrones if Louis died without issue.
During these years Maximilian built up for himself a considerable party in Hungary,
especially in the west of the country, but he also had many opponents. The national party,
strong among the smaller nobles, refused to recognise the validity of the dynastic
compacts, and a Diet in 1505 actually passed a resolution never again to receive a foreign
king. This party's candidate, should Ulászló's line die out, was one John Zápolyai,
whose uncle and father had risen from small beginnings to hold successively the office of
Palatine under Mátyás, while John himself was Voivode of Transylvania and the biggest
landowner in Hungary.
Meanwhile, under King Dobre's rule, conditions in Hungary plunged downhill with
Gadarene rapidity. His electors had forced him to repeal all Mátyás' 'innovations',
including his extraordinary taxation. This involved the dissolution of the Black Army, the
chief instrument of Mátyás' personal power; for defence, the nation now reverted to the banderial
system. The king had also to promise to convoke the Diet regularly, giving advance
notice of the subjects which he proposed to lay before it, and to agree that no decree
issued by him was legal without the Council's confirmation. He fell entirely into the
hands of the clique round him, who plundered the royal revenues so ruthlessly that only a
fraction of them reached the treasury. The annual revenue fell to under 200,000 florins.
The king himself was reduced to selling off Mátyás' collections. Sometimes he had
literally to beg for food and drink for his court. At one carnival the king's own estates
could produce only eight turkeys.
The power of the magnates, which at the same period became almost total in Bohemia, was
to some extent limited in Hungary by the resistance of the lesser nobles, who succeeded in
asserting a right to a share in the membership of the Council, as also to attendance at
the Diet. In 1514, too, they achieved a remarkable paper reaffirmation of their position
in the shape of a codification of the Customary Law of Hungary, drawn up by the jurist
Werbôczy. This work, known as the 'Tripartitum', which, although never formally
promulgated, was ever after universally treated as authoritative, laid down in explicit
terms the complete legal equality of all nobles, as enjoying 'one and the same liberty'.
In practice, this helped them little politically: even in the Diet the magnates could
always get their way by prolonging the debates until the small men could stay away from
their farms no longer.
It did, however, help to reaffirm the cardinal distinction between the free and the
unfree population, and the most unhappy feature of the period was the swift deterioration
of the position of the latter class. The phenomenon was not a specifically Hungarian one;
it was occurring simultaneously in Germany, Bohemia and Poland, and even set in rather
later in Hungary than in the neighbouring countries. But here, too, the peasants found
their burdens progressively increased and their liberty, especially that of escaping from
a tyrannous landlord, progressively restricted. The Diet of 1492, while confirming their
right to change their masters, reduced their inducement to do so by making it illegal for
any lord, including the king and the Free Districts (the prohibition was extended to the
boroughs in 1498) to exact less than the minimum legalised dues and services. This Law was
a serious blow to the market towns and the Districts, which under Mátyás had achieved a
half-free condition, compounding their obligations for a relatively small annual sum. In
1504 peasants were forbidden hunting or fowling.
Then, in 1514, there came an extraordinary and terrible episode. The Cardinal Primate,
Tamás Bakócz, aspired to the Papacy. He was not elected, but as consolation and
diversion, entrusted with the organisation of a crusade. None of the big men volunteered,
but a huge army of peasants and masterless men did so. Bakócz put them under the command
of a Szekel professional soldier named Dózsa. Left without proper leadership or supplies,
the wretched crusaders grew restive and presently Dózsa turned them not against the Turks
but against the lords. The movement expanded into an almost nation-wide jacquerie. There
was savage fighting in which fearful atrocities were committed on both sides. Then the
revolt was put down. Dózsa was put to death by indescribable tortures. A Diet intoxicated
by a spirit of almost inconceivable vindictiveness ordered the most savage reprisals
against all leaders and all perpetrators of any atrocities, and their kinsfolk, and
condemned the entire class of peasants, with certain exceptions, to 'real and perpetual
servitude'. They became irrevocably bound to the soil, in which they were explicitly
declared to have no ownership whatever - they were wage-earners pure and simple. Their corvée
was raised to fifty-two days in the year, and their other dues and payments
increased. This savage law, too, was enshrined in the Tripartitum
Louis succeeded his father in 1516, but, a boy of nine, naturally could bring no
remedy. Meanwhile the defences of the country went from bad to worse. The frontier
garrisons were left without pay, the fortresses fell into ill-repair. The king disbanded
his own banderium for lack of funds, and several of the magnates followed his
example. Then, in 1520, the Turkish threat grew acute again. Suleiman the Magnificent
succeeded to the Sultanate and at once sent Louis a demand for tribute; when this was
rejected, he marched on Belgrade and took it. The country awoke to the danger and agreed
to a general tax for establishing a permanent mercenary army, but this was to replace, not
supplement, the existing system. The lords were relieved of the obligation of maintaining banderia
and the lesser nobles from obeying the levée. The proceeds of the tax were embezzled
and the army never raised.
Hungary was given a brief respite by the Sultan's decision to reduce Rhodes before
turning north again, but in 1525 attack was again imminent. Messengers scoured Europe
appealing for help, but hardly any came; the Empire was occupied with France, Poland with
the Tatars, Bohemia was indifferent. When, in 1526, the Sultan commenced his advance in
earnest, it was at first almost unopposed. The levée was, after all, proclaimed and the banderia
re-activated, but when, in July, Louis set out from Buda he had at first only 3,300
men with which to meet the Sultan's 70-80,000 regulars and half as many irregulars. By the
time the two armies made contact at Mohács, Louis' army had swollen to 25,000, but the
detachments from Transylvania and Croatia had not yet arrived. Disregarding advice to wait
for these, the Hungarians attacked on 29 August. The army was almost utterly destroyed and
the king himself perished by some fatal mishap in the rout.
1. By this time the tradition had grown up that coronation was
invalid unless performed with the Holy Crown.
2. Strictly, the porta was the gate through which a
peasant's wagon passed into his yard. It was thus not an exact measure, since two or three
peasants might share one yard.
3. The resentment was particularly strong where religious
considerations reinforced purely political ones, as among the Bogumils of Bosnia.
4. A mere coincidence (Ed.).
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